Les Savy Fav - Root For Ruin

As much as we music journalists love to get the jump on you by rating and reviewing everything we can, and presenting you with our ‘expert analysis’ before you’ve even had the chance to buy (that’s BUY) the product in question, sometimes circumstances overtake these efforts. Les Savy Fav pushed the release of this, their fifth album, forward almost six weeks as a result to the, frankly, inevitable internet leaks, so maybe you already have your shiny copy. If not, well ‘Root For Ruin’ is a worthy continuation of their oeuvre, and a better album than 07’s ‘Let’s Stay Friends’. The NYC quintet are increasingly leaning on their bombastic, vaguely anthemic qualities – which were pretty much always there, but often submerged below skronk and surrealism – with results sometimes suggesting The Hold Steady if they returned to their punk origins (‘Lips N’ Stuff’). Elsewhere, opener ‘Appetites’ hails the Silver Jews by, well, filching a lyric of theirs (the repeated “I love you to the max!”), and ‘Dirty Knails’ packs an infectious stop-start punch with a heavy resemblance to Future Of The Left. Given that Les Savy Fav were a notable formative influence on Future Of The Left, this all suggests a healthy degree of turbulence in the indie-punk gene pool.